Companies and their CFOs and other managers are taking advantage of advances in data analytics and dissemination to help drive management decisions and strategy.

The pace of innovation in collecting, analyzing and distributing information within companies is putting valuable information into the hands of managers, who are closer to customers and eager to make decisions based on real-time data rather than outdated reports from the finance department.

“This is a sea change in how information is being analyzed and distributed in the CFO’s organization,” said Matt Armanino, chief operating officer and partner-in-charge of the CFO advisory practice at the San Ramon accounting firm Armanino McKenna. “The CFO’s ability to push information out to the organization is going to be one of the top issues in the next couple of years.”

That will allow CFOs to play an even more valuable role within their companies.

“Business analysis tools help the finance group in moving beyond being just scorekeepers to being more strategic, forward-looking and helpful in driving the business,” said Ben Netick, chief financial officer at Livermore-based Access Information Management, which helps companies with records retention and destruction.

“The power comes in providing strategic information that measures performance in unique ways, helps drive operational efficiencies and uncovers potential revenue opportunities,” Netick said. “Business analysis tools allow the finance group to bring together lots of data from different systems and make connections that would be hard without the tools. The really cool thing is the ability to make these connections on the fly and present them in many different ways to leaders in the company.”

The ability to share those findings with executives and managers on a self-serve basis is a high priority.

CFOs said managers and other employees needed to involve others to obtain information for decision-making 72 percent of the time. But the respondents would like to see these employees get the information they need through self-service applications 66 percent of the time.

“The cloud has changed everything by serving as a platform and spurring innovation,” said Armanino, pointing to the tens of millions of venture capital dollars flowing into startups harnessing the power of data and analytics.

Spurring the drive to distribute self-serve data are professionals coming into the workplace accustomed to information at their fingertips via smartphones and tablets. They aren’t willing to wait for special reports to be generated by the finance department before making key decisions.

Other data vendors are building businesses to provide information to corporate executives setting strategy as well as to meet the voracious appetite of hedge funds and other investors seeking to profit on emerging trends.

San Francisco-based Revere Data has about 50 employees analyzing regulatory filings, press releases and other public disclosures to track supply chains among more than 40,000 companies globally.

“There’s opportunity for Revere to map the networked economy. Just as Facebook and Twitter connect people, we connect companies, sectors and supply chains,” said CEO Kevin O’Brien, who worked for Reuters’ global private equity group in London before taking over at Revere Data.

“We’re providing this new insight into the networked economy. We ask ourselves three questions: What does a company do? Who do they work with? And who are its customers?” O’Brien said. “We think those answers allow you to identify the next Facebook, Google or Genentech.

“You hear a lot about Big Data lately. We’ve been in Big Data for the past five years,” he said. “We’re in the first quarter of the game. There’s massive opportunity.”

“We have some corporate clients who use our data for business intelligence and financial intelligence,” O’Brien said. “We go to companies and say, ‘We know more about your company than you do,’ and they don’t disagree with us.”

The company provides data for some of the biggest names on Wall Street. Seattle-based Russell Investments debuted investment products in September based on Revere’s data. The firm’s data is also used by Google Finance to provide insight into a company’s competitive landscape and the connections within their supply chains.

As an example of using its data as business intelligence, O’Brien says it can go to a corporate client and say, “Did you know you have 10 competitors in one of your main product lines and 17 competitors in an emergering product line?”

Ron Codd sees the growing role of data analysis as a board member on several companies, including Rocket Fuel in Redwood Shores and Veeva Systems in Pleasanton.

“In the movie ‘The Graduate’ people were whispering in Dustin Hoffman’s ear, ‘plastics.’ Today, we’re in the era of analytics,” Codd said.